Of all the songs sung round the Bathukamma, one tells how she was born, and in many villages it is sung first, before any other. It is a chandamama song: every line ends on chandamama, the moon. The song names its own maker, Bhattu Narasimha Kavi. His family told the folklorist Biruduraju Ramaraju that he had lived at Mogilicherla, near Warangal, five generations back, and Ramaraju wrote in 1958 that in the Warangal country at least one person in every house knew the song by heart. This is what it tells.
Long ago, in the Chola country, there ruled a king named Dharmangada, and his queen was Satyavati, a woman of great truth, the song says. The two of them kept a hundred nomus, the vrats Telugu women keep, and they were given a hundred sons.
The sons grew into brave men, and every one of them was killed by the king's enemies. Then the father and the mother fell into a grief that did not lessen. The king gave up his wealth and his kingdom, left his kinsmen behind, and went with his wife to live in the forest.
There the king kept a long, hard tapas to Lakshmi Maa. At last she stood before them and said, "Ask me for a boon." They praised her, and they begged her for one thing: that she be born as their own child, from Satyavati's womb. Lakshmi Maa was pleased at heart, and she was born to Satyavati as a daughter.
Just then sages came to that place: Kapila and Galava, Kashyapa and Angirasa, Atri and Vasishtha. They looked at the child, the one child of a house that had lost a hundred, and said, "This girl has lived," and they called her Bathukamma: bathuku is life, and amma is mother. From that day her father and mother called her Bathukamma with love, and all the people called her by that name.
Telangana families have long given the same name to a child born after long waiting, or to a child who lives when others of the house did not.
The king counted himself blessed. He went back with his daughter to his own city and ruled the land once more. Then Sri Mahavishnu came to the king's house in a king's dress, under the name of Chakranka. He married Bathukamma, and they had many sons: six thousand, the song says, and all of them handsome.
King Dharmangada and Queen Satyavati lived out their days in happiness, with riches that had no equal. And Bathukamma came to stay on the earth, for ever.
Other villages tell it other ways. One telling, which Tatikonda Vishnumurthy found in Gopu Linga Reddy's book of Telangana working songs, says that Gauri Maa fell into a faint of weariness after killing the asura Mahishasura, on the first day of the bright fortnight of Ashwayuja. The women sang to her with all their hearts, begging her, "Bathukamma, live, mother," and on the fifth day she came to herself. From then on she was Bathukamma.
Another telling is of a farming couple whose first six children died at birth. The seventh was a girl; they named her Bathukamma, and she lived. She married and went to her husband's house. One day she and her brother's wife bathed at the village tank and came out in each other's saris by mistake. Bathukamma scolded her, and the sister-in-law, in her anger, took her life and buried her on the bank. That night Bathukamma came to her husband in a dream. When he reached the tank, a tangedu bush was in full flower where none had grown before, and it told him everything. She asked that every year a Bathukamma be stacked of tangedu flowers, with Gauramma on top, played round on the bank of the tank and set on the water. Her husband had it all done by the married women of the village, and the village has remembered her ever since.
The song of her birth ends with its own blessing. Whoever sings this song, and whoever hears it: Gauri Maa gives them saubhagya, a long and happy married life; Lakshmi Maa gives them wealth; and Vani, who is Saraswati Maa, gives them a great name.
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